Code sources and manage nodes

Coding, or gathering material by topic, is a fundamental task in most
qualitative projects. It tends to be a cumulative rather than a one-stage
process, with the meaning and structure of your nodes changing over time.

This topic provides some strategies
and ideas for managing the process—refer to About Coding for more detailed
instructions.

Where to start?

Coding is one
of several techniques for making sense of your data—you can use it in
conjunction with writing memos. The way
you handle coding depends on your methodology and research design.

You could start with ‘broad-brush’ coding to organize your
material into broad topic areas (you can use Text
Search queries to help with this)—then explore the node for each topic
and do more detailed coding:

Researchers working in methodologies such as phenomenology or discourse
analysis may get straight into detailed coding (making nodes as required)
and then, later on, combine and group the nodes into related categories.

You could combine these approaches or experiment to see what works best
for you.

What is the purpose of coding?

Coding the content of your sources can contribute
to your analysis in the following important ways:

The process of coding
brings you closer to your data and 'forces' you to focus on your material—asking
questions like; What is this about?
Is it about more than one thing?How
does it help me answer my research question?

Coding lets you gather
all the material about a topic in one place (for example, what
did everyone say about water quality?)—this makes it easier
to see patterns, contradictions and to develop theories.

Coding facilitates the
use of queries and visualizations allowing you to look for connections
between themes and test your understanding. For example, you have
a hunch that tourism impacts
water quality—use a coding query
to gather content coded at water quality
where it is also coded at tourism
and explore the connections.

How much coding should I do?

The amount of coding you do depends on your research
design, the project time frame and the volume of data you are working
with. A social scientist on a long term project may carefully code the
source material—looking for subtle themes and the connections between
them. A brand manager may be more interested in analyzing broad topic
areas in order to make rapid strategic decisions.

A researcher working with a large dataset (like the
results of a survey) may use a combination of auto coding and Text Search
queries to speed up the coding process.

Coding must have a purpose—it is never an end in itself. Watch for the
following indicators that you may need to re-evaluate your coding strategy:

The purpose of the coding is hard to discern.

The coding is largely descriptive (this
text is about that topic) instead of analytical (this issue matters
because...)

You are easily bored while coding. If coding
is generating new insights and questions, you should not be bored.

You
are doing nothing else. Coding is only one way of interpreting your
data, it should be combined with other tasks like writing memos and
running queries.

You may not need to exhaustively code all your material.
For example, if after working through twelve interviews you are not finding
any new themes or ideas – you may have reached ‘saturation’. You could
use Text Search queries to do some broad-brush coding in subsequent interviews.

Different types of coding

As you reflect on a piece of content, think about these different types
of coding:

Topic coding—What is the topic being discussed?
For example, water quality, real estate development, tourism
and so on. Text
search queries can help you to search for topics in your material.

Analytical coding—Once you have organized
your material by topic, you can review the content of your nodes and
ask What is this content really about? Why is it interesting? How
does it relate to my research question? Consider the meaning in context
and express new ideas about the data. For example, ideals
vs realityortension between developers and residents.

Case coding—Who is speaking? What place, organization
or other entity is being observed? You can code the material at a
'case node' and assign demographic attributes—refer to Classify
nodes for more information.

Coding at multiple nodes (co-occurring nodes)

As you work with your source material, consider coding content at multiple
nodes. For example, you could code Barbara’s comment at all of the nodes
shown on the left:

water quality

development

sea level

negative attitude

Barbara

Barbara:

Well it’s a major one. Water quality
in general and– I don’t know all of the issues related to larger
scale development, but yeah I think that a lot of the easy land
that can be approved easily has already been developed. It’s very
low. And sea level rises. And so I think that problem is only
gonna get worse.

If you code all your interviews like this, then you can use queries
to gather your material in different combinations. For example, show me